Very cool. The photographer clearly like taking pictures of people jumping - to demonstrate how well his camera could capture a fleeting moment, apparently.
Wow, thanks so much for this. It’s fascinating to see what shutter speeds were possible in that era. And my, how beachwear has changes since then!
Love the shot of Maggie on the diving board.
One funny thing is that he has pictures of people jumping off walls and boxes, but the picture with the diving board has the person just standing still. Of all the times to get a picture of a person in the air, a diving board would have been one of the best. I also noticed that in the picture of the walkers, he captured a moment which would have disqualified one of the walkers. The walker 2nd to the left has both feet in the air, which I think disqualifies a person in a walking race.
Derby hats seemed to be extremely popular.
I like the second picture down, proving that the habit of New Yorkers never looking passersby in the eye is an ancient one.
Why the heck is there so much jumping?
The third from the last photo is particularly interesting to me (and not just because there’s no jumping). It’s of Dreamland, one of the three big Coney Island amusement parks, and behind the circus performers is the Dreamland Shoot-the-Chutes ride, while to the left is the Fighting the Flames show. Both of these shows had copycat versions at Revere’s Wonderland, as I wrote about in my book (IN fact, so did the circus in the foreground. Wonderland, like Dreamland, had a circus ring beyond the “splashdown” region of the Shoot the Chutes ride)
There’s a Mutoscope movie showing the Fighting the Flames show at Dreamland here:
They actually built an elaborate set resembling a city block and set it on fire twice a day, with fire engines rushing to put out the flames and rescuing people from the burning buildings.
The photographer is presumably asking people to jump because the ability to freeze fast movement was new and he wanted to test or demonstrate it.
It also helps to be looking down to avoid stepping in horse poop.
About halfway down, there’s an image of a girl and a woman throwing a ball back and forth. The woman looks unsettlingly like Almira Gulch from the Wizard of Oz. Of course, that’s just how women dressed back then, although I see that her name was Grimwood. Yeesh.
Cool. My grandfather, from the Albany area, went to school in NYC during that time period – private school starting in 1884 at age eight up through Columbia University.
Absolutely cutting edge. Same time as Muybridge, the Edgerton of his time. Muybridge was funded by Stanford, Edgerton, at MIT, by the Manhattan Project.
And what strikes me is that these photographs were a public market pleasure–like Edgerton’s Raindrop and all those stopped balloon bursts, etc, down to the slow-mo guys on youtube.
I’m glad this thread was revived. I forgot how much I enjoyed seeing vintage photos of people jumping.
One of the most dangerous things about living in NY has always been dodging the elephants as you try to cross the rails. We lose thousands of people every year.